Announcing arm64 Support in Our Node.js Package Repositories

We here at NodeSource are big fans of ARM. If ARM chips could talk, I'm sure they would be looking at several of us and saying "Why are you so obsessed with me?" on a regular basis.

If you don't believe me, I have this mini Raspberry Pi 3 cluster in my home gear closet:

I was honestly really quite proud of that kit, until I realized that our Chief Node Officer Rod Vagg has this setup in his garage:

SO. MUCH. RPi. At any rate...

We have for many years supported the armhf architecture where we could for our community builds of Node.js packages. If you have a Raspberry Pi and are installing Node.js from our repositories, it's thesearmhf based packages that you've been using.

Some time ago, we started getting the first inquiries from people asking about support for 64bit ARM chips, meaning the arm64 instruction set. Our position had always been that we would look into support for that architecture if and when there was enough interest from the community to warrant the time investment on our end.

I am happy to say that we decided the time was right, so effective immediately, there are arm64 packages for Debian Jessie and Sid, as well as Ubuntu Trusty, Xenial, and Yakkety available from our repos.

Thanks very much to all of the people in the Node.js community for their continued interest in this platform. We can't wait to see what you build.